Reposted from THE NATION.

Drains and Bathtubs

Matt Bivens

Here are some fun pictures and graphics from the website of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission: This one (a PDF file) is a cross-section drawing of how, while plant operators snoozed, acid dripping over a period of years chewed through the six-inch carbon steel lid of the Davis-Besse nuclear reactor vessel. This one is a photograph of the rusty, acid-charred hole itself. And this one is from the happy ending: A shot of workers and a huge blue truck that’s transporting a replacement lid for the reactor.

Taken together, they tell a neatly delineated success story: Machine breaks, problem identified, machine fixed — nay, improved! — machine roars to life, better than ever, everyone much wiser and more knowledgeable for the experience.

So if you want to complain, as I have in recent days, about how the Davis-Besse reactor came, thanks to outrageous negligence, within a fraction of an inch of disaster, fine. But doing so is also probably a waste of time, because the plant’s operators simply counter that they’re very, very sorry, and that they’ve spent two years and hundreds of millions of dollars on repairs and improvements, and that everyone from the NRC to the criminal justice system now has the plant and its safety culture under a microscope — so what’s the problem? Davis-Besse, like a late-night highway driver riding the adrenalin of having just narrowly missed a deer, is on full alert; so why not go hassle some other reactor?

There’s a lot of logic to that argument — especially when you look at some of the other problems Davis-Besse fixed quietly during its long idle.

Consider, for example, the story of how — shut down anyway to fix the acid hole in its reactor — Davis-Besse got together with the NRC to overhaul some emergency backup systems.

The plant’s operators reported to the NRC that key backup systems — a series of drains and pumps to keep a runaway reactor fed with coolant water — had been flawed ever since the plant opened 27 years ago. The company’s report admitted that in an accident, the pumps would probably not have worked properly. The NRC studied this report and declared it to be a code “yellow” finding, “one of substantial importance to safety.”

But as I reported in The Nation six months ago, this problem with the backup drains and coolant pumps exists at 68 other, similar-designed nuclear reactors across America. Yet only Davis-Besse has addressed it. And this is so despite a shocking study by the nuclear-industry-friendly Los Alamos National Laboratory, which suggested that this problem represents a one-in-three chance of disaster at an American nuclear power plant over the next three years. (The NRC’s response was that they’d fix the problem in … four years.)

The Los Alamos study went reactor by reactor across America, calculating a risk level for each plant — and back then, before Davis-Besse made any improvements, Davis-Besse was considered one of the least risky plants. One of the most risky was the Indian Point reactor complex outside New York city. Yet the NRC, which judged the problem at Davis-Besse to be a “yellow” alert, ignored calls to have the same problem tackled at Indian Point. What kind of logic is that? Answer: the best logic that money can buy, of course.

When you think about 68 reactors across the United States whose key backup systems have been fatally flawed for years, from the moment they began operations, you start to realize that to wrangle over whether Davis-Besse got off easy is to wrestle a straw man. Of course they got off easy, and of course it’s an outrage. But the real question is: What about all of the other reactors — and what about those government regulators, who let Davis-Besse skirt so close to disaster, and who now are sleep walking through similar dangers at nuclear plants from coast to coast?

* * *

We are approaching the 25th anniversary of the Three Mile Island accident. Twenty-five years!

In this context, let’s remember that the accident at TMI came in the plant’s first year of operations. Accidents at other plants, from Browns Ferry to Chernobyl, also occurred in the very early days of each plant’s operations.

This conforms with the Bathtub Curve, the classic engineer’s illustration of failure over time. The curve is shaped like a bathtub, because things are more likely to break down when they’re new, or when they’re old.

“All of the nuclear accidents [so far] occurred in the first year or two of operation, or on the ‘break-in’ phase. Plants are now out of that phase. They are in, or heading toward, the ‘wear-out’ phase where failure rates climb,” says David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s only a matter of time before we start populating the right side of the curve with plant names.” We can put Davis-Besse there already. Who will be next?

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